Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Tag Archives: Fall Movie League

This, the thirteenth and final week of the Fall season, was the last chance for people to jockey for position, and with a new Disney Pixar title hitting theaters, there was the possibility of some movement in the final ranking. The lineup for the week was:

Projections for the Pixar title Coco seemed decent, but not enough to support that price in light of other options. So after that mad minute first Monday pick, where I always anchor on the film that is going to top the box office, I spent my time exploring other options and “what if” scenarios. Justice League and Wonder played out in some of my plans.

Then on Wednesday I saw a couple of articles projecting Coco to run past $70 million. At that run rate Coco was suddenly very viable and I went back to building a line up anchored on that, deciding to also bet heavily on Lady Bird due to the positive social media buzz it seemed to be getting.

Then in the FML Slack channel Ben curbed my enthusiasm by pointing out that those $70 million and up projections were for the entire week, as Coco opened up in the US on Tuesday, and not for the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday time frame that would count for the FML league. Damn press not taking my needs into account.

Anyway, that put Coco back down at maybe $50 million again and I told myself I needed to go back and redo my lineup. And then Thanksgiving came, which we host at our house, and all of the fun and work that goes with that and the next time I thought about FML was on Friday morning at about a quarter to ten, less than an hour after the picks were locked, but it might as well have been forever since I was stuck with where I had left things on Wednesday.

My Fall Week Thirteen Picks

So my hope was that Coco would do much better than expected.

It did not, just passing the $50 million mark expected of it.

Meanwhile, the winning bet of the week was Murder on the Orient Express, which got the best price/performance nod and was the anchor film for the perfect pick of the week.

Fall Week Thirteen Perfect Pick

542 players got the perfect pick this week, which is a sizable number and makes me wonder why I didn’t at least see that as an option.

Amongst those with the perfect pick was Corr, thus cementing his win in the MCats League and the overall Meta League. The scores for the week for the Meta League were:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $118,127,443

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $110,643,594

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $110,643,594

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $110,643,594

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $89,095,650

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $89,095,650

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $82,679,441

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $78,853,690

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $78,853,690

Kraut Screens (T) – $77,042,620

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $76,819,285

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $71,832,620

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $70,520,361

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $69,468,295

TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)

MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

There is a new name on the list, Po Huit, who joined in for the next season, but got in a pick for week thirteen and won the week in the TAGN league, so I figured I had better mention him.

Meanwhile, the bottom three on the list are all people who anchored on Coco. That was clearly the bad pick of the week.

With week thirteen complete, the final scores for the Fall Meta League are:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $1,241,295,127

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $1,181,566,118

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $1,150,719,925

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $1,149,644,649

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $1,122,285,136

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $1,113,910,654

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $1,084,359,341

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $1,011,733,999

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $995,906,854

Kraut Screens (T) – $871,754,429

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $871,715,649

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $842,656,155

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $717,236,170

As expected for the last few weeks, Corr came out on top for the overall Meta League and also won 5 of 13 weeks in the MCats League.

Despite being down in 6th place I managed to eke out a win in the TAGN League after weeks of battling for the first spot with SynCaine. However, I only came out as the league winner once during the season, while SynCaine took the top spot five times. Wonder week and the huge win for me there sank him.

And I doubt I would have been in first place had Pak not started a week late. He won 4 of 13 weeks in the TAGN League and would have no doubt come in first in the league if he had been there for the initial week. The gap between us was a mere $29 million and he surely would have done better than that on week one. I feel like there should be a Roger Marris asterisk next to my win.

So that is the end of the Fall season. Congrats to Corr, the overall winner, and everybody who managed to win a week or even managed to play every week. Just remembering to get in and make your picks is half the battle sometimes.

There will be a Winter league. My plans are to do weekly posts for that as well. And, after Pak and Po Huit soundly thrash me in that venture, to take the Spring season off in order to feel fresh for another run at the Summer blockbuster season.

In order to keep the season separated there will be a second post today with the initial movie lineup and some comments about what is to come. Thank you for playing!

The penultimate week for our Fantasy Movie League fall season has passed.

Also, “penultimate” is one of those words I use whenever I have the opportunity.

With one final set of picks for week 13 yet to go, now would be a good time to think about joining our league for the winter season. Clicking on this link will send you on your way. I was wondering whether or not to keep going with this, but we have Star Wars: The Last Jedi coming up, which should be a wonderfully budget distorting venture. Pricing for a weekend when the top movie is expected to bring in $250 million should be interesting.

But that is all in the future. First we need to review what happened on week twelve, the week of Justice League’s launch, which saw the pricing as follows:

Monday evening, when the new week is unlocked, I immediately do a quick, gut level pick without doing any research whatsoever on the theory that it will get one of my bad ideas of of my head quickly.

This time around I anchored on two screens of Justice League Sunday and filled in from there. Then I started poking around and decided that Justice League was not going to be the pick for the week. Pricing was based on it doing something close to $150 million but by Tuesday there were already murmurs about that being optimistic.

Based on the pricing and initial predictions, The Star looked to be a good bet for the best price-performer for the week, but I wasn’t buying that either. Stuck for choice I redid my picks anchored on three screens of Thor: Ragnarok and then played with options for the back fill as the week went on.

By late on Thursday projections for The Star had begun to wane, Justice League was under $125 million, and I was sitting there with Thor and Blade Runner 2049 wondering if I should stick with that. Box Office Pro, one of the sites I watch… in part because they do weekly projections and in part because they don’t post a hundred things a day like the Variety movie section can… popped up with their forecast, which had Wonder at $17 million, up from a modest $12 million earlier in the week.

I put that in my spreadsheet and it looked to be the clear pick for best price performer. I took that as a sign and went in with seven screens of Wonder, leaving a screen of Blade Runner 2049 there, more a pick from the heart than from logic. After that I was busy and didn’t have time to follow up until after the picks were locked on Friday morning.

My Fall Week Twelve Picks

Looking at the MCats league, I was clearly not the only one who saw the swell Wonder was getting. Of seven active players, six of us went heavy on Wonder. Over on the TAGN league however, only Pak and I were in on Wonder, with Justice League taking the anchor spots for four players and Thor for another.

And then Saturday rolled in and, for once it was not the Saturday of false hope, as Wonder was projected to hit $27 million. At that level nothing else was poised to touch it and the only real question was what film was required in that eighth screen for the perfect pick of the week.

Well, it wasn’t going to be Blade Runner 2049, which was running at about half of the best estimate I could find for it. Three Billboards was the right filler instead, giving a perfect pick worth just shy of $213 million. 906 people got that, including four of the MCats league.

Fall Week Twelve Perfect Pick

Still, even without the perfect pick, anchoring on Wonder was going to lift me up against SynCaine. Last week his Daddy’s Home 2 lineup killed, a situation helped by my bad-in-hindsight Geostorm heavy lineup. That put him $23 million ahead of me. Then we got the results for week twelve.

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $212,937,228

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $212,937,228

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $212,937,228

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $212,937,228

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $207,916,834

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $207,461,101

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $192,196,924

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $90,471,789

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $80,640,147

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $77,851,048

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $75,091,163

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $72,529,183

Kraut Screens (T) – $66,355,138

TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)

MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

There was a four-way tie for first this week, which meant not a lot of movement. The only one assailing Corr was Aure and they maintained their gap.

Otherwise, people who bet heavy on Wonder had a six figure week and those that did not were stuck in the five figure zone, leaving Meta League season totals looking like this:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $1,123,167,684

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $1,102,712,428

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $1,071,866,235

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $1,066,965,208

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $1,042,078,034

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $1,011,641,542

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $1,013,838,980

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $934,914,714

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $885,263,260

Kraut Screens (T) – $794,711,809

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $782,619,999

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $773,187,860

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $628,140,520

So Corr seems pretty secure in first place, and Aure in second. The third place battle is now between Elly and Ben, while I seem to be in the gap between fourth and sixth. And SynCaine, who was in the race for third spot last week fell back to eighth place due to Wonder paying off so big.

That leaves us with once week left in the fall season, with the following choices:

Leading the pack is Coco, from Disney/Pixar. It already had a huge opening in Mexico, we shall see if Pixar magic continues north of the boarder. Justice League is here for its second week and ought to be worth north of $40 million. Thor is still in play as well. Then there is the week 12 ringer, Wonder, now priced more appropriately. Also new to the list this week are Roman J. Israel, Esq., The Man Who Invented Christmas, and Loving Vincent. And I still have one more week to put Blade Runner 2049 in my picks.

As I write this on Monday night, I couldn’t tell you which way to jump, but my current anchor is Coco.

Finally, as noted above, I will be carrying on for the Winter season. Click here to join. We shall see what Star Wars does to the league.

Competing with Thor for anchor position in people’s lineups were two new entries, Murder on the Orient Express and Daddy’s Home 2.

Estimates on both of the new films were somewhat soft, with those willing to commit to a number sticking below $25 million on each while those giving a range allowed that either might go past that and close to $30 million. But nobody strayed much beyond that.

Meanwhile Thor was a pretty solid bet for $55-65 million. Having wrested the lead of the TAGN league from SynCaine last week, I felt that the conservative track might be best. So I anchored on Thor, put on a pair of Bad Moms Christmas, and then filled in with Geostorm.

My Fall Week Eleven Picks

Going with Geostorm was mostly based on it exceeding estimates every week despite being critically panned as a disaster of a disaster movie.

Thor came in a little low, but still in the range I expected. But Daddy’s Home 2 seemed to be doing better than expected and was pulling up close to $30 million in the Saturday estimates. That was giving SynCaine, who went in with three screens of Daddy’s Home 2 a lead for the week. The only redeeming factor was that Bad Moms was the best price/performer and the $4 million extra that was giving me helped mitigate the strong Daddy’s Home 2 showing.

But I always call those first estimates “the Saturday of False Hopes” because the usually change by Monday. Sure enough, on Sunday the roles had flipped, Dads passing Moms, putting Daddy’s Home 2 as the best price/performer, sinking my own picks to the bottom of the list.

Corr, who pays closer attention to these things, and who was in for six screens of Bad Moms so was keenly interested in the outcome, said early Monday that the margin between the two was thin enough that it could go either way with even a small shift in the final numbers.

However, it was not to be. When the numbers were finalized, Daddy’s Home 2 was the best price/performer and the anchor for the perfect pick.

Fall Week Eleven Perfect Pick

123 people got the perfect pick for week eleven. Fortunately, SynCaine was not one of them. However, his anchoring on three screens of Daddy’s Home the only person in our overall group to do so, gave him his fifth win in the TAGN league and a win in the overall Meta League, with the numbers shaking out as:

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $115,590,767

Kraut Screens (T) – $104,712,521

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $100,919,575

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $96,030,514

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $95,384,287

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $94,984,586

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $94,252,816

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $91,751,712

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $90,021,774

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $89,618,203

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $89,093,184

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $88,224,634

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $88,224,634

TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)

MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

I was feeling pretty good when I saw that Aure and I had the same picks for week eleven, she having done much better than I overall. Pity we were of like minds on the week when she chose poorly.

That left the overall Meta League looking like this:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $910,230,456

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $889,775,200

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $858,929,007

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $857,063,666

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $854,027,980

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $834,616,933

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $819,444,618

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $805,922,146

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $794,791,471

Kraut Screens (T) – $728,356,671

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $701,979,852

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $698,096,697

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $555,611,337

Corr’s third place finish this week put him solidly out in front of Aure again. Aure, likewise, has a pretty solid hold on second place. The close fight is for third place where this week’s results put Elly and SynCaine past Ben, who went all-in with eight screens of Bad Moms this week.

Then I sit down in sixth place, not completely out of the running, but I need a big week or one of those three to stumble in order to move up a notch or two.

Which leads us to the options for week twelve, the penultimate week of the Fall season.

We have another big super hero movie opening for week twelve. Justice League, like Thor two weeks back, is supposed to open so big relative to the rest of the pack that it has been divided into Friday, Saturday, and Sunday screenings.

The Justice League three-way, along with new films Wonder, The Star, Lady Bird, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri managed to push Thank You for Your Service, Happy Death Day, Only the Brave, Victoria & Abdul, The Foreigner, It, and Subrubicon off the list this week.

So Justice League seems to be the safe bet, being predicted to open even bigger than Thor did. Putting Batman and Wonder Woman on the same screen will do that I guess.

On the other hand, Justice League is pretty pricey. There is no “three Sundays” option as with Thor. Friday seems like a sucker bet again, with maybe a Saturday and Sunday plus some very cheap filler being my main guess. That might be my last chance to put Blade Runner 2049 in my lineup.

But without Justice League, where do you go? With Thor good for $25 million or so, what do you team him up with? There is The Star, a rework of the Christmas nativity billed as a “computer animated Christian comedy film” starring animals. I guess in a world with Veggie Tales that is possible. And then there is Wonder, where photogenic parents struggle with the problems of a child with facial deformities. Or there are last week’s properties, Daddy’s Home 2 and Murder on the Orient Express.

As with many big blockbuster weekends, the main man, Thor, was divided into Friday, Saturday, and Sunday picks because, with a weekend estimated take in excess of $100 million, each one of those days was expected to top all other films playing.

In addition, in the ongoing holiday creep, Bad Moms Christmas was also opening in the first weekend in November. You can barely get the Halloween decorations down in time for Christmas. Its predecessor, Bad Moms, did well, but I was dubious that it would be a contender this week even with the reduced price.

Everything else was too cheap to be an anchor, so for me it really came down to what flavor of Thor to go with.

My going theory has been that Friday is a sucker’s bet, that while it generally has the biggest take, it has not been, in my limited observations enough to offset the high price of that day. So Friday was off the list. I was looking for some combo of Saturday and Sunday.

In the end I decided that three Sundays would get me the most bang for my buck. It was the filler that was the tough choice. I went with two screens of Blade Runner 2049… I do pick with my heart a little too often… and three screens of It.

My Fall Week Ten Picks

Of course, after the picks were set it came out from our resident expert that, when it comes to Friday, the Thursday night previews… and there was some discussion as to what constitutes a preview as opposed to simply opening on Thursday, the answer to which seemed to be that it is a preview if the studio says it is and that is that… count towards the Friday take.

So Friday was going to get Thursday night as well, and Thor’s Thursday night take was substantial. As an experiment concerning Friday I had set my daughter’s account the two screens of Friday Thor and three screens of Victoria & Abdul, leaving three screens empty, just to test my Friday theory. On learning about the Thursday aspect of it, I wondered if I was going to lose to my alternate pick yet again.

As it turned out, my theory about Friday was proven somewhat correct. The dollars per FML buck spent was worst on Friday and best on Sunday.

Sun – Take $32.1 million – $ per FML buck $107,000

Sat – Take $44.2 million – $ per FML buck 99,774

Fri – Take $46.5 million – $ per FML buck 97,077

So in the Thor contest, Sunday won.

However, Thor did not take the best price/performance prize. That went to Geostorm, which turned into the spoiler when it came to my nice little theory. Despite Sunday being the best for just Thor, the perfect pick required Thor and as many screens of Geostorm as you could fit. That ended up being Thor Firday, Thor Sunday, Jigsaw, and five screens of Geostorm, a selection good for $116,069,538.

Fall Week Ten Perfect Pick

121 people share that pick, none of which were in the Meta League.

That pick was barely more than $5 million ahead of the second place pick, which was built on three screens of Sunday Thor… or basically a gap equal to the perfect pick… and even one person in our Meta League topped $110 million, so it wasn’t a huge winner.

As for the Meta League, we shook out like this for week ten:

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $110,014,123

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $105,076,239

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $105,076,239

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $103,857,511

Kraut Screens (T) – $102,448,226

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $101,301,375

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $99,569,296

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $99,547,397

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $99,526,715

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $95,735,316

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $94,415,232

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $92,011,615

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $91,960,520

Meta League Legend:

TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)

MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

Pak took top honors with a pick based on three screens of Sunday Thor and a pair of Geostorm screens securing his lead. Going with three Sunday screens put people at the top of the list. Betting on Bad Mom’s Christmas put you at the bottom.

That left the overall scores for the Meta League as such:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $809,310,881

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $801,550,566

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $762,276,268

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $764,676,191

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $746,392,299

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $741,472,899

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $729,422,844

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $716,828,962

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $705,173,268

Kraut Screens (T) – $623,644,150

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $605,949,338

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $603,112,111

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $460,227,050

Corr remains at the top, but his lead has shrunk considerably and Aure could catch him before the season is through. Otherwise first place is pretty much secure from the rest of the pack at this point, barring a huge week where both Corr and Aure forget to pick.

SynCaine’s Bad Moms Christmas pick let me pass him once again and take the lead in the TAGN league. Again, not a huge gap between us.

And then Pak, who won the week in the TAGN league for the third time, but started a week late, has passed another person who was in the Meta League for the whole season. It is not impossible for Pak to catch up and take first, which would be an amazing feat, but both SynCaine and I have to screw up considerably to make that happen. We shall see.

Thor, given the standard first week slip of about 50% should still be good for more than $50 million, making it an obvious anchor.

Then there are two new titles, Daddy’s Home 2, which holds no appeal for me personally, and Murder on the Orient Express, which features Kenneth Branagh and some of the most outrageous facial hair ever to grace a lead character. I mean, I know that Poirot is very much about his facial hair, but I always pictured him as extremely fastidious about it. Branagh looks like he has two gray privet bushes trying to escape from his face. Every time I see the trailer I reach instinctively for my hedge trimmer.

Then again, almost every modern Poirot is spoiled by the fact that I first saw him played by Peter Ustinov, whom I adore, in Death on the Nile and a few further Agatha Christie titles. For me it would be like seeing somebody other than Alan Arkin play Yossarian in Catch-22; I might accept it, but it would never be the same.

So those are possible anchors, followed by all the dregs of the past weeks. We have two choices at the $6 level, if you need to squeeze in one last screen. We’ll see if I manage to get Blade Runner 2049 into my lineup yet again.

Week nine of our fall Fantasy Movie League is now past and the pre-Halloween weekend was a boon for scary movies.

The week started off with a toss up over which movie would make a solid anchor based on the initial pricing and revenue estimates. The choices were:

Jigsaw $277
Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween $214
Subrubicon $150
Geostorm $126
Happy Death Day $90
Thank You for Your Service $89
Blade Runner 2049 $67
Only the Brave $59
The Foreigner $55
It $38
American Made $31
Kingsman $29
Same Kind of Different As Me $27
Victoria & Abdul $27
The Snowman $26

The top two new players on the list were Jigsaw, a continuation of the Saw series of movies, and the Clooney/Coen brothers film Suburbicon, with last week’s top earner, Boo! 2, stuffed in between. The initial box estimated put them at about $12, $10, and $8 million respectively, which meant that you could build a pretty solid lineup out of any of them.

And then Jigsaw started getting some traction in the press. While the die hard Saw fans were saying that no picture in the franchise had ever opened for less than $18 million, Variety and a couple other sites coming out mid-week with estimates in the $20 million range made that a more solid statement.

Meanwhile Suburbicon, always a stretch given the rather rarefied air in which the Coen brothers can operate, started to tank in estimates. $8 million became $6 million which became $4-5 million, all of which scared any watcher of the industry off of it as an anchor choice.

So Jigsaw became the clear anchor. At anything close to $20 million it would not only take the week but also be the best price performer. I estimated that if it could just get past $16.6 million it would be a shoe-in for both. Then it would be a matter of what five films would fill in the other screens.

I went with the maximum three screens of Jigsaw, two screens of It, and three screens of American Made, a mix which happened to also spend my entire $1,000 budget.

My Fall Week Nine Picks

And then we were off to the movies.

As it turned out, Jigsaw did better than initially projected, but broke the “$18 million or more” streak that the Saw fans were touting in support of the film. That number is now $16.6 million.

$16.6 million was also the number I felt it had to get past to be the best price/performer, and in not managing get over that hurdle I was at least correct in it not hitting that goal. Instead it came down to a tight race between It and The Foreigner which It won in the end. That made the perfect pick three screens of Jigsaw, three of It, and two of Victoria & Abdul.

Fall Week Nine Perfect Pick

Two people in the Meta League, SynCaine and Elly, both managed to get the perfect pick for week nine, a feat they shared with 736 other players, netting them each $71,714,400. The standings for the week ended up as:

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $71,714,400

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $71,714,400

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $66,269,674

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $64,035,847

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $59,991,939

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $59,195,899

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $55,345,800

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $54,933,396

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $53,631,625

Kraut Screens (T) – $51,618,295

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $49,834,984

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $41,511,450

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $22,861,476

Meta League Legend:

TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)

MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

The $2 million per screen price/performance boost plus the $5 million perfect pick bonus lifted SynCaine and Elly ahead of the pack. That latter bonus is pretty much all that stands between those two and Darren who only failed to go with Victoria & Abdul as his final two screens.

Meanwhile The Filthy Fleapit was all in on Suburbicon, with six screens of it in play, and paid the price as the film didn’t even clear the revised low-ball estimates, hitting only $2.8 million.

That left the overall season scores as:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $713,575,565

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $696,474,327

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $665,149,476

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $657,200,029

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $649,461,284

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $642,534,788

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $628,121,469

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $610,758,036

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $606,814,839

Kraut Screens (T) – $521,195,924

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $513,988,818

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $503,564,714

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $360,657,754

The big changes on the list were Elly jumping up to third place and SynCaine passing me to take the lead in the the TAGN league and fifth spot overall. Again, the weight of the bonuses is seen both. The gap between us now adds up to the bonus for one screen of It and the perfect pick bonus. He has won four of nine weeks in the league, but the bonus is what put him in the passing lane. Kraut Screens also passed The Filthy Fleapit largely on the latter’s poor showing this week. Thanks a lot Suburbicon.

And now we’re looking at week ten with Halloween behind us and another superhero blockbuster weekend with Thor: Ragnarok hitting the screens. As often happens in such weeks, Thor is expected to dominate so hard that it has been broken up into three picks for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Certainly Bad Mom’s Christmas, another new title this week, isn’t going to threaten it. The lineup is:

Amazingly, or perhaps optimistically, Suburbicon stayed on the list this week. Just barely, but there it is.

I think the lesson from past three day splits is to avoid Friday and take some combo of Saturday and/or Sunday plus the right mix of low price titles to fill in your screens. Getting the right mix there can make or break your bid, as we saw in week nine, and there are a lot of possible choices at the low end.

When I wrote up my projection for this week… or what passes for a projection anyway… I thought anything between Boo! 2 and Blade Runner 2049 could possibly be an anchor, though I felt that those two titles were the least likely to be so. Boo! 2 seemed over-priced while Blade Runner 2049 has been a heart break of under performance since it launched.

After buying into Blade Runner 2049 heavily in Week 7 I was saying, “Won’t get fooled again!”

…nobody is going to convince me that seven screens of Blade Runner 2049 are a good idea after the current results.

-Me, just a week ago

And then, of course, the reviews and the projections for the weekend started showing up. The reviews for The Snowman were especially biting, not that anybody let Geostorm off the hook either. Those two and Boo! 2 made up a trifecta of red pen scores on Metacritic.

Only The Brave got good reviews but was expected to be a slow performer. That left only Happy Death Day and Blade Runner 2049 without something to speak directly against them… aside from past performance. But you know, there I was, sitting there thinking that if only Blade Runner could just drop less than 50% week over week this time it could be a contender. All it really had to do was bring in about $8.5 million to make it a solid pick at that price. Given the competition, that seemed like it could happen… I mean, if I still bought into that whole “slow burn” idea for Blade Runner.

I hemmed and hawed and changed up my picks as many times before the lockout last week as I have probably ever done. I went back and forth, but in the end I doubled down on Blade Runner 2049. It hurt me last week, surely it would make it up to me this week, right? Seven screens of Blade Runner plus a screen of It was my pick.

My Fall Week Eight Picks

My alternate pick for the week, entered into my daughter’s account, was two Happy Death Day, two Geostorm, and four Same Kind of Different As Me.

With those locked I settled in to wait for the numbers to roll in.

Saturday looked bad. Blade Runner 2049 was trending to just $6 million for the weekend. Meanwhile, nobody seemed to have paid attention to reviews, at least in the case of Boo! 2 and Geostorm, as both were booming. But both The Snowman and Only The Brave seemed to be falling behind expectations. A Geostorm heavy pick seemed to be the optimum.

People just don’t pay attention to reviews any more.

But I refer to Saturday as the day of false hope for a reason. The projections you get are only based off of Friday night and more than a few times I have seemed to have a winning pick on Saturday, only to find that the update projects and final tally go a different direction.

And it was true that, in the end, Blade Runner 2049 revived a bit from its Saturday estimate. My daughter and I went to see it, which I am sure helped a little. But the winning pick of the week was something of an anomaly, being five screens of Geostorm, two screens of Victoria & Abdul, and one blank screen. It was nearly two screens of My Little Pony and a blank screen, but Victoria overcame the ponies in the end. Either way though, the winning combo required you to take a $2 million hit off the bat by leaving a screen blank.

Fall Week Eight Perfect Pick

I am not sure I could ever quite make it that far in dedication to my pick. But for 37 people, leaving a screen empty was no big deal, and they all got $85,789,110 for their effort. (There was also a blank screen contingent that went with My Little Pony rather than Victoria & Abdul, and which would take the prize was a near run thing.)

Fortunately… for some of us… nobody in the Meta League got the perfect pick or anything close to it really. A few people picked one screen of Geostorm and that was it, leaving the weekly scores looking like this:

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $57,247,405

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $56,324,221

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $55,693,800

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $55,527,354

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $55,048,267

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $54,923,720

Kraut Screens (T) – $54,056,029

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $52,247,686

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $51,441,248

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $50,943,134

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $39,623,861

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $36,059,024

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $34,968,514

Meta League Legend:

TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)

MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

There was not a lot of white space between first and tenth place on that list, spanning less than seven million dollars, with only Logan, Darren, and Isey paying the price for supporting their local firefighters.

With that most people advanced their totals in lock-step, neither gaining nor falling back, save for the aforementioned trio.

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $653,583,626

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $637,278,428

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $603,568,404

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $593,435,076

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $578,498,941

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $578,286,485

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $577,746,884

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $555,824,640

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $551,469,039

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $491,127,342

Kraut Screens (T) – $469,577,629

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $462,053,264

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $294,388,080

Corr remains out in front of the overall league, with Aure remaining a ways behind waiting for him to slip, while SynCaine and I remain neck and neck in the TAGN league. A reminder that those past seventh place started late, save for Isey. Pak though seems to be taking the one week handicap in stride and looks poised to pass Logan soon.

And so we face week nine, the weekend before Halloween. Will people go to parties or the movies this coming weekend?

Jigsaw $277
Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween $214
Subrubicon $150
Geostorm $126
Happy Death Day $90
Thank You for Your Service $89
Blade Runner 2049 $67
Only the Brave $59
The Foreigner $55
It $38
American Made $31
Kingsman $29
Same Kind of Different As Me $27
Victoria & Abdul $27
The Snowman $26

The Mountain Between Us, LEGO Ninjago, and My Little Pony dropped off this week, replaced by the Saw revival Jigsaw, the Clooney/Coen brothers flick Suburbicon, and PTSD tale Thank You for Your Service.

For anchors you can build off of Jigsaw, Boo! 2, Suburbicon, or Geostorm, but I don’t have any sort of feel for which one might be well placed. None of them seem likely to bring in big bucks. Jigsaw, returning to an over played cult classic, might have some play due to Halloween I suppose. The Coen brothers have made some great stuff, but they tend to be small market, film festival fare, even with big names headlining, so I am not sure how much pull Matt Damon will have with Suburbicon. Meanwhile Boo! 2 and Geostorm are both in their second weeks, so may be spent forces.

My gut at this end of the week (Monday night as I write this) is to load up on Suburbicon and then figure out what low end fillers seem likely to exceed expectations… and to try not to mix in wish fulfillment with thoughts like, “If Blade Runner could just do…” when picking. Replicants have let me down enough already.

The research vault seems to indicate that more people are jumping on Jigsaw however, and there is a claim in Chatter that no Saw movie has ever opened for less than $18 million on its first weekend. If true, Jigsaw is very under priced. We shall see.

Also, as a bonus, FML is having another four week contest league with a $1,000 prize for the winner. You might as well join if you’re playing. Click on the red banner currently on the site to get in on it.

Week Seven of our Fall Fantasy Movie League is now in the rear view mirror, meaning we’re past the half way point of the 13 week season.

Way back at the beginning of week seven the picks available seemed to offer multiple possible avenues to success.

Happy Death Day $350
Blade Runner 2049 $237
The Foreigner $143
The Mountain Between Us $99
It $95
My Little Pony $84
Victoria & Abdul $80
Kingsmen $71
American Made $71
LEGO Ninjago Movie $70
Marshall $62
Flatliners $34
Battle of the Sexes $24
American Assassin $9
Til Death Do Us Part $7

Happy Death Day, a murder mystery meets Groundhog Day film, seemed to be clear to top the box office and was priced accordingly. Blade Runner 2049 was only in its second week, so still had potential to deliver at its lower price. And then there was The Foreigner, a Jackie Chan vehicle that

Any of those three seemed possible anchors for a successful pick.

At its price, Happy Death Day seemed the least likely of the three to be the winning pick, even if it exceeded its estimate, which it did in spades, bringing in $26 million while only expected to hit about $20 million.

Blade Runner 2049 had been predicted to be a slow burn, a movie that wouldn’t be strong out of the gate, but which would sustain its box office over time rather than dropping 50% on the second week. I calculated that if it could just keep the second week drop to 45% or less, it was a strong candidate.

Meanwhile The Foreigner felt a bit under priced. At $143 a screen you could get six screens of it, plus a couple of fill ins, and if it exceeded its $10 million estimate by even a bit it would be a strong contender.

The good news, for me, is that I went with six screens of The Foreigner and two screens of American Made, which turned out to be the perfect pick of the week, shared with 415 other players, good for $106 million.

Fall Week Seven Perfect Pick

The bad news is that I picked it on my daughter’s account, my alt account, where I put the pick I didn’t take for my main account. Wilhelm went with four screens of Blade Runner 2049, Battle of the Sexes, and three screens of American Assassin.

My Fall Week Seven Picks

This was me letting my gut out vote my brain. I’ve beaten myself with my alt pick three weeks out of seven now.

I was down to the wire deciding which way to jump, and in the last moment I went for Blade Runner 2049 more because I wanted it to do well than because I really believed it was going to make my goal.

And it did not make my goal. It dropped 53% over opening week, reinforcing the suspicion in the back of my brain that perhaps the cult classic status of the original Blade Runner didn’t mean it was as popular as I thought it was. A basic projection problem. I liked it, people who talk about it generally like it, but that did not translate into a mass audience. RIP my Blade Runner 2049 plan and any hopes of a sequel.

Still, my picks were not the worst in the bunch though… not to be mean… I did worry a bit when I saw Isey and I had identical picks. The scores for the week went down like this:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $101,436,978

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $98,288,772

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $97,984,090

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $84,946,755

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $72,994,597

Kraut Screens (T) – $72,607,820

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $70,991,190

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $64,869,289

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $64,869,289

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $64,869,289

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $64,294,226

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $66,533,492

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $59,853,529

Meta League legend

TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)

MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

Ocho and Bel both stopped picking over the last few weeks, so Liore’s league has been dropped from the list since I am the only active player there now.

Those at the top went heavy on The Foreigner, which pulled in $13 million plus was the best price/performer, giving it a $2 million boost, making it worth $15 million per screen. That is almost as much as Blade Runner 2049.

Past that are the people who anchored on Blade Runner 2049 or Happy Death Day, which came out to be about equally poor choices in the end. That left the overall scores as follows:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $597,259,405

Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $585,837,180

Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $552,625,270

Elly’s Elemental E-Plex (M) – $537,907,722

Wilhelm’s Films from New Eden – $523,575,221

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $522,053,084

Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $521,039,080

Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $520,856,126

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $496,420,772

The Filthy Fleapit (T) – $438,879,656

I HAS MOVIES (T) – $425,994,240

Kraut Screens (T) – $415,521,600

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $254,764,219

Week seven put me way at the back of the pack for the MCats league. Catching Corr seems unlikely unless he forgets to pick. Otherwise he generally picks as well as I do or better every week save the first.

However SynCaine and I remain neck and neck in the TAGN league, though both of us had best be wary of Pak who, despite starting a week late, is catching up to us.

New on the list are Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween, which doesn’t appeal to me, but I have long understood that there is no accounting for taste, Only the Brave, a wilderness firefighting tale that seems spot on given recent events, Geostorm, a natural disaster flick that seems maybe a bit too spot on given recent events, and Same Kind of Different As Me, for which a pithy summary eludes me.

The top six movies on the list are all potentially anchors. (Going all-in on The Foreigner would leave $160 on the table, which is never a good plan.) I am not sure which way to jump at this point. Boo! is too expensive relative to current estimates while nobody is going to convince me that seven screens of Blade Runner 2049 are a good idea after the current results. So my own anchor will likely be something in between those two.